Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia to mark a milestone in its construction, even as Covid-19 shutdown threatens to put 2026 target for declaring basilica’s structure complete out of reach
- Barcelona’s top attraction, the Basilica de la Sagrada Familia, has been dogged by delays since the church’s cornerstone was laid in 1882, so what’s one more?
- While it will mark a construction milestone on December 8, Covid-19, which brought work to a halt, means it may not be declared structurally complete in 2026
In 1882, the bishop of Barcelona laid the cornerstone of what would become the city’s top tourist attraction – a soaring church in the flamboyant Catalan modernisme style, a local version of nature-driven art nouveau. Its 18 slender towers soar above the Spanish city’s skyline, beaten in height only by Montjuïc, the hill that supplied much of their stone.
But 140 years later, they remain incomplete, the construction of the Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family, or Sagrada Família, persistently dogged by delays.
His replacement of del Villar’s modest and humdrum neo-Gothic church with something revolutionary in both its design and engineering, to be, at 172.5 metres (566 feet), the tallest church in the world did nothing to speed things up.
During the 1936–39 Spanish civil war, anarchists torched Gaudí’s models and designs, which left his disciples subsequently doubling as both detectives and architects, piecing together the master’s intentions from what remained and scouring previously published plans and newspaper articles.